


The Truth in Your Eyes

by ausmac



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-10
Updated: 2017-05-10
Packaged: 2018-10-30 03:49:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10868463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ausmac/pseuds/ausmac
Summary: This was written prior to the release of the final novel so obviously it should now be considered an AU.Despite its harsh violence, I still feel its one of my better HP stories.





	The Truth in Your Eyes

Voldemort had been really pissed off.  He'd walked back and forth in front of me in that strange, sliding walk of his, and I could tell he was choosing.  Which way to kill me.  Which way would hurt me the most. 

I'd been searching, been looking for the last horcruxes and I knew the destruction of the others had to have hurt him.  He was really angry.  Well, who wouldn't be? 

But instead of Crucio or some other nastiness, instead of threatening me or telling me what he planned to do in gruesome detail, he'd just stopped with his back to me, then turned, and he was smiling.  

The smile was the last thing I saw.  He just raised his wand and hissed something and his power struck me in a wave of light and pain. 

And the next time I opened my eyes, I was blind.

 

 

The plate and mug were in the usual places when I woke, and I didn't even bother to smell them anymore.  It didn't matter if they were bad, or poisoned – in fact, I'd begun to hope they would be.  But it was just the usual sort of thing, just enough food to keep me alive.  It was a piece of hard bread and an apple, and plain water in the mug.  That was all I'd get, no meat, nothing really sustaining, and I knew my stomach would be aching by the end of it. 

It was one of the few ways I had of telling the passage of time.  I thought it might have been a week since I was taken, if the growth of beard was anything to go by.  My facial hair was never very thick at the best of times, but I could feel it on my chin and cheeks.  I had to look a sight, naked and dirty, covered with scratches and bruises. 

They were never very gentle when they raped me. 

Hope had taken a few days to die, and in its place I'd begun to consider suicide.  Problem was, how to do it, and make it work.  If I ran at the wall and tried to brain myself, I couldn't guarantee I just wouldn't make things worse – and worse included being crippled or brain damaged.  The mug and plate were useless, I couldn't smash them to cut myself with, and I thought if I managed it, the beasts outside guarding the door would smell the blood, and raise a warning. 

There was no pattern to the abuses, other than there were less than there had been in the beginning.  After the first time I'd woken, frantic with fear, it had been almost constant.  One after another, using and hurting, unseen bodies on top of me and inside me, grunting and gasping.  I was torn open repeatedly, healed repeatedly, until my body toughened to the usage.  I never got used to the foul smell of their breath, or the taste of other things I was forced to take in.  My very helplessness seemed to excite them even more.  I think one of them was Lucius Malfoy, I remembered the smell of his cologne from school, but I couldn't be sure, and he never said his name.  None of them did, and  I didn't care, really. All they shared in common was the nameless, faceless fear and pain. 

Then the visits lessened, though they didn't entirely cease.  Perhaps they had new amusements elsewhere.  I thought I heard screams, but it might have been echoes of my own voice, and it might have been nightmares, too.  I had a lot of those. 

Time drifted, brief periods of peace followed by interludes of pain.  I wondered if I might go mad, and I thought it was possible. 

Then, one day, I was touched by someone else. 

 

I rolled over on the bedding, my only comfort, the one thing between me and the cold stone floor.  It was foul – I  couldn't see it, but I could smell it.  Dirt and smell were the least of my problems, and even the fleas hardly bothered me at all.  I squirmed, trying to find a more comfortable place in the nest of dirty fabric, when I heard the door open.  It wasn't time for my food, and I couldn't help shuddering. 

A hand touched me on the shoulder and I flinched backwards against the wall.  I heard a slight scraping of feet on stone, and it touched me again.  Fighting it was useless but I had an urge to fight, just once, to show I was a bit more than a vessel, a catamite.  I pushed at the hands. 

"Leave me alone, you bastard!" 

Days of abuse and lack of proper food had weakened me, so the struggle was a fairly brief one.  When I'd wriggled may way into the corner, panting and damp with sweat, the hands returned.  I weakly pushed at them but whoever it was ignored me, slid the hands under my arms, and lifted me up. 

I was half-dragged, half-carried across the room and out the door.  Cold noses sniffed at me as I passed; from the damp canine smell of them they either werewolves in wolf form or dogs set there to guard me.  They growled and I stumbled away from the sound, against the person supporting me.  I clutched fabric, a robe of some sort, and was dragged further along towards wherever we were going. 

A little while later we stopped and the sound changed; we'd entered a larger room, and I heard the sound of water.  He was going to drown me!  I pushed at him - assumed it was a him from the strength and the height – in sudden panic.  I'd never much liked deep water, not since the Triwizard Tournament, and the thought of drowning was awful.  He ignored my struggles, continued dragging me and then I was in the water, up to my chest. 

Being thrown into water, not knowing how deep it is or where it is, not being able to see or tell --  it's terrible and I just stood, shivering – until the hand lodged on the top of my head and pushed me under the water. 

That was it, then.  I was being drowned.  I flailed about, hands and legs thrashing, and then the hand grabbed my hair and pulled me out into the air.  I spluttered and choked, tossing out mouthfuls of water.  A moment later I was pushed under again, and then dragged out again. 

It was only when I smelled the soap that I realised.  I wasn't being drowned; this was someone's idea of bathing!  The hands were in my hair lathering it, and I was a bit more prepared when I was pushed under again, and closed my eyes to keep the soap out.  

"Bastard!" I said, spitting out soapy water, "you could have warned me!" 

There was no response, just more dunkings and more soap. 

I heard movement in the water and realised he was behind me.  I tried to turn but the hands held me in place, and all the time he'd not said a word, nor made a sound.  

When my hair was cleaned to his satisfaction, he took my arm and moved me into shallower water that came up to my knees.  Then he began washing me, using a soaped sponge of some sort.  Back and buttocks, thighs and calves, then around to the front over my chest, stomach, groin and legs, arms and hands.  Even my face got a clean; oddly, he tapped near my eyes before beginning and I closed them as he swiped the sponge over my face.  It was an odd thing, and I puzzled over it as he cleaned me. 

It was a totally impersonal experience.  There was no groping, no interest in my body beyond the need to clean it.  He could have been a giant house elf for all the concern he showed to my naked and helpless state.  

When I was totally clean, he led from the pool or bath or whatever it was, and dried me down with a cloth or towel.  Still naked, but cleaner, he took me back to the place of my imprisonment. 

The abuses continued regularly, but not as frequently.  And every days he would return to clean me.  He also began cleaning the room and replaced the foul rags I slept on with a thin but sweet smelling mattress.  When I lay on it I could smell mint and lavender and eucalyptus, things that kept the vermin away but also lulled me to sleep.  

Then one day he didn't come, nor the following one, and I found I had something else to worry about.  Had he left, died, forgotten me?  When, the following day, the door opened and I sensed the familiar presence, I scrambled up to my knees in relief. 

"You're back!  I thought…did they hurt you?" 

After a moment, the familiar hands slip under my arms and lifted me again.  But I sensed something – the walk wasn't as firm and the hands shook a little.  Something told me he was unwell. 

"They did hurt you, didn't they?  Was it because of the mattress?  Was it because you were kind to me?" 

But he didn't speak, just took me to the bath and washed me with his usual patient thoroughness.  All the way I talked to him, pleaded with him to tell me.  

"Please, won't you talk to me?  No-one talks to me – well, except for the dirty talk when they are doing the sex.  I can't…" 

Fingers rested on my lips:  be quiet, they said, so I stopped talking.  Then his other hand lifted my arm and placed my fingers against what I realised was a set of lips.  The face moved from side to side, slowly. 

It took me a while to work it out.  He didn't talk because he couldn't talk.  I was blind, and he was dumb, and that was the way it was. 

When I realised, I was angry.  I don't know why, I just was. "Well, I'm sorry.  Did Voldemort do that to you?" 

The hand took my fingers and put them to his cheek and I felt him nod.  Yes.  When he let go I let my fingers linger there for a few moments.  It felt good to touch someone of my own choice, someone who wasn't hurting me.  

He was a little taller than me, and the face was stubbled with beard, so it was a man.  After those few seconds he took my hand away.  I might have imagined it, but I thought the gave it the slightest squeeze. 

That night my abuser was particularly cruel.  The sex wasn't enough for him, he wanted me to scream as well, and he found ways to make me do that.  I thought they weren't allowed to kill me, but you can do a lot to someone without it being fatal.  He used things, sticks I think, to shove up inside me until I was torn and bleeding, and then he hit me with the sticks, calling me filthy little mongrel and dirty boy and so on until I finally passed out. 

I couldn't walk the next day, but my friend came and helped me.  He rubbed things into my skin that eased the pain, gave me something to drink that was even better.  But it was all getting so that I didn't care.  When he helped me up to take me to the bath I held onto him, pressed close, and whispered: 

"Push me under the water.  Make me drown.  Please.  It wouldn't take much, just hold me down and it will all be over and I won't hurt anymore.  Please." 

Even the thought of drowning didn't bother me any more. 

He shook his head, made a little choked sound, the first sound I'd heard him make.  He took my hand and held it to my heart.  If he was telling me I was alive, I knew that.  If he was telling me to keep living, I didn't want to know.  I kicked at him, and swore at him, using some of the language the men had taught me. 

"Fuck you!  You aren't the one this is happening to!  I've had enough!" 

He repeated the gesture.  Live.  And then he clenched his fist and wrapped my hand around it.  I thought he might be telling me to fight.  But all I knew, at that moment, was that I would have to live some more, and I didn't know how to fight. 

"How can I fight?   I'm blind!" 

A finger tapped my head.  Once.  Twice. Hard.  Think, he was telling me, and I could almost hear the words.  You have a brain.  Think. 

During after the bath, I began doing just that.  All those days, I hadn't thought.  But he was right, I'd lost only one sense, I had all the others and I still had my magic, even without a wand.  I'd done magic without a wand before, and I could do it again. 

If Voldemort thought he'd destroyed me by taking my eyesight, he had another think coming. 

I began considering the kinds of magic I could use.  Not having a wand was a disadvantage, but even as a child I'd done things, small things, without having a wand.  I had to test the theory first, though, in case there was some sort of anti-magic spell on the place I was being kept in. 

During the quietest time of what I assumed was the night, I curled onto my mattress and tried a quiet _Conjuro_.  It didn't work at first, but not because of any warding; I just wasn't trying hard enough.  So I drew on all of my will and my strength and my need to get out of there, and I tried again.  

I whispered the word, felt the familiar buzz of power in the air, and then my hand clasped the shape of the thing I had conjured.  It was a small stone, a pebble, the sort of pebble you find in a creek bed, washed smooth by the water.  

As with all conjured items, it disappeared in a little while, but it proved I could do it, I could use magic there, and without a wand.  All I had to consider was what I needed to do. 

They thought I was blind, and I was.  They thought I was powerless, but I wasn't.  I was Harry Potter. 

Over the following days he came again regularly, to clean my room and to clean me, and during the time we began establishing a type of language.  Little by little, I learned to speak the finger language – it was slow, incredibly, tediously slow, and would take a long time to communicate the simplest thing.  But in time I learned that we were in an old castle on an island off the coast of northern Scotland, and that Voldemort was not always in residence.  He came and went, bringing in new followers, punishing old ones, and it appeared that the use of my body was a reward of sorts for his new Death Eaters.  It seemed a sorry sort of reward, but I might have been a bit prejudiced. 

But even after my repeated slow questions, my friend would not tell me his name.  So I called him Saviour, which seemed to amuse him.  

He helped me through particularly bad days, when the rapes were worse, when my morale fell and I just wanted to die.  He kept prompting me to practise, to learn, to strengthen myself.  I knew that he was becoming more dangerous to me than any curse Voldemort might use on me.  He was becoming important to me, and if Voldemort were to know that, then he could hurt me even more. 

Despite the fact that Saviour had never made even the slightest sexual suggestion, I started to find his touch arousing.  I think it was the comfort of it, the fact that I was being touched without pain or duress, in a way that soothed and relaxed me.  One day, in the bath, as he washed me with his usual fastidious care, I twisted under his hands and pressed myself back against him, took his hands under the water and curled them around my genitals. 

He froze, utterly still, and I sensed the tension in his body.  Whenever he bathed me he wore only underpants, and I could feel his arousal pressed to my buttocks.  It excited me and I dropped my head back against his shoulder.  

"I need this," I whispered, squirming back and forth under his hands, against his thighs.  "I need to feel someone touching me who doesn't hate me.  Make me feel better, please." 

It was like a charm, a spell of will put into words, and he gave a small, dry groan as his hands clenched me.  Large fingers worked beneath my penis, stroked the skin beneath and around my balls, then those two hands took me and squeezed, up and down, as hard as I liked it but no harder.  His larger body settled around me in the water, legs circling me, arms enfolding me and I felt protected and cared for.  When I came within the circle of his fingers, it felt like a healing. 

I swung around, curled my legs around his waist and buried my face against his neck.  I didn't know who he was or even his name, but in that moment he was my Saviour.  He was the only person who had ever touched me that way.  He was my first. 

His fingers talked to me as he dried me, in the slow, deliberate way we had of talking. 

 _Tonight he returns he will hurt you time to go_  

I sensed the time to make a break for freedom had arrived.  I'd been practicing for days and could conjure small items.  I'd finally managed to conjure up a blade, a small dagger that, while it wouldn't cause a lot of damage, could still be deadly in the right circumstances. 

While he couldn't speak and therefore couldn't do any real magic, Saviour was a support and I felt I could trust him when the moment came. 

They came for me as expected, and I was dragged out of the cell and further into the castle.  I heard voices, some of them familiar, and the occasional lewd comment or laughter as I passed them.  My nudity had become so familiar I gave it no thought, concentrating all my efforts on looking cowed and helpless as I was taken through into His presence. 

The two men dragging me tossed me onto the floor and I landed hard, bruising my elbows and knees, and the gasp of pain was genuine.  

"Bring him to me, Severus." 

That got a reaction.  Snape!  Snape was there.  Of all the people I wanted to kill, only Voldemort himself was higher on the list.  I tried to pull away as Snape grabbed my arms and pulled me up, and turned my head towards him, and spat. 

"Oh dear, I don't think he likes you, Severus.  And you have taken such good care of him all these weeks.  How ungrateful a boy he is." 

Shock rippled through me and I sagged.  Snape!  Snape was Saviour!  It was Snape who had washed me, cared for me. Held me.  Touched me.  Betrayal tore into my heart like a knife and I sobbed.  Nothing Voldemort's creatures had ever done to me had hurt me so much as that. 

I was sobbing with hurt and fury when I was given to Voldemort and his cold fingers touched my wet face.  He bent towards me, I felt his sour breath and his cold lips suckled on my cheeks.  "Lovely.  It should be bottled, like a memory.  Essence of Grief, tainted by madness and debauched innocence."  He pulled me up onto his lap, my legs on either side of his thighs and I felt his fingertips running across my chest, to touch and tweak my nipples.  "I have watched my Death Eaters tame you, Harry, because I wanted you broken before I took you.  When my seed is inside you, when your blood is in my mouth, you will cease to be the Boy Who Lived, and be nothing at all."  He bent me backwards and took a nipple into his mouth, tearing the flesh with his sharp teeth.  "The universe will be in balance again, and I will have nothing to fear from you." 

I didn't care, then, if I lived or died, and escape had become irrelevant.  I reached out a shaking hand and felt him; his shoulder, the taut line of his throat. 

"Please…"  I whispered, the shake in my voice rising naturally.  "No more.  This has to end." 

He laughed and licked the blood from my torn chest.  "It will, Harry, very soon." 

And while he savoured my blood, lost in the power he thought he'd woven around me, I drew on every ounce of my will and strength, uttered the _Conjuro_ and plunged the dagger that came to my hand into his throat. 

He screamed, pushed me away and I fell backwards against something yielding.  Snape.  Arms held me, there was a familiar wrenching sensation and the last thing I heard was the sound of werewolves howling and Voldemort's screams, abruptly silenced. 

 

I hadn't destroyed all the horcruxes, but having your heart eaten by a werewolf makes it very hard to return to life.  If he did, the wizarding world was, perhaps, a little more prepared to confront him. 

As for me, no amount of magic or muggle science managed to restore my sight.  Whatever he had done, he had done it thoroughly.  

When I had recovered enough, they told me about my return, how Snape had deposited me outside St Mungos and apparated away.  I don't know how he got out of the castle with no wand or magic, but I guessed a portkey of some sort.  He was always a cunning bastard. 

As grateful as they were to have the problem of Voldemort solved, nobody quite seemed to know what to do about me.  A hero they could deal with and even use, a blind one was a bit more difficult.  With a new wand, though, I had little need of anyone's sympathy or care.  Hermione, Ron and the rest of the Weasley family were kind and tried their best, but I refused to be anyone's charity case.  I took some of my money, rented a little flat and set about finding out how magic could best serve me in a world reduced by a sense. 

My other senses sharpened; my hearing was already acute and became even more so.  I became sensitive to odours, to changes in the air, it was as if my skin had become magically infused with a sort of radar.  I really missed reading, though.  And quidditch.  No positions available for a blind seeker.  

Yet I taught myself to fly again.  Certain spells allowed me to sense objects, to judge height and the ground, and overcoming the fear of blind flying was a challenge that occupied some of my time.  I rose to the challenge, as it were. 

But at night, when I was alone in the silence of my rooms, I dreamed of hands touching me.  Sometimes they were bad dreams, and at such times a few mugs of Scotch did the trick. Other times, though, they were good hands, hands that soothed, hands that caressed.  And in my dreams I smelled eucalyptus and lavender and mint, and my stupid, lonely heart longed to feel Saviour's touch again. 

 

 

_The smile on your face lets me know that you need me_  
_There's a truth In your eyes saying you'll never leave me_  
_The touch of your hand says you'll catch me whenever I fall_  
_You say it best when you say nothing at all_


End file.
